As a consumer and regulator call for improved food quality and safety, a sensitive monitoring of contaminants in food, for example, chemical compounds, drug residues, toxins and pathogens is crucial to assess and avoid risks for human health. Traditional analytical techniques to detect these compounds are usually based on separation techniques with different detectors that occasionally are costly, tedious, require highly trained personnel and not valuable for field analyses. To achieve a sensitive monitoring, there still is a high need for sensitive, simple, quick, cost-effective and portable detection methods. Biosensors contain these characteristics and are thus perfect for food monitoring. The biosensor technology may have in delivering analytical methods capable of overcoming many of the aforementioned technical challenges. A recent trend is the emergence of aptamers as detecting elements that has the potential to replace all the above ligands. Aptamers are short artificial single-stranded DNA alternately RNA segments. Targets for which aptamers can be developed are varied and range from small molecules to proteins and even whole cells. In addition to this advantage, aptamer technology offers several other benefits over antibodies (sensitivity, specificity, reusability, stability, non-immunogenicity, cost-efficiency), which can be easily exploited in biosensor technology. Aptasensors are thus basically biosensors based on aptamers as ligand molecules. Here we review the various applications of aptasensors in the food industry. We have clustered aptasensors as indicated by their signal-harvesting methods, including optical and electro-chemical approaches.

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